Today I am taking some time to discuss support for Game of Thrones Ascent, and the support philosophy behind our games in general. I want to help our players understand what our goals are when we answer their support tickets.

Our current support team uses a help desk product called ZenDesk. We chose ZenDesk over other companies because it offers the vast majority of what we’re looking for, along with a very flexible keyword tagging system for tickets, which allow myself and our team to view what our players are reporting. It also grants us some flexibility in how we build our reporting queries, letting us see at a glance what our hot issues are.

Aside from moving to ZenDesk, we had a few broad goals for our support team:

- Reach an 80% satisfied response rate by the end of July.

- Improve our satisfied response rate to 87% by later in the year.

- Resolve all of our tickets within 48 hours unless they require significant investigation. We're working on getting our ticket times down and hope to hit this very soon.

- Better apply our ticket metrics to game bugs so that we can prioritize bugs that greatly affect players.

I can happily say that we reached an 80% satisfied response rate a month early! As of this week, our players have been rating our responses at 80% satisfied. This is due to two reasons: First, our development team has been able to resolve many bugs in our latest game builds, including making some very significant increases in performance. Second, our support team, especially Shan, BelleJinx, and Khatie, truly feel for our customers and try their hardest to make them happy. Knowing this, it will be impossible to deliver on 100% satisfaction for all of our players. Some players may run into an issue that we cannot assist with, or find a bug that will take some time to resolve. Some players may become unhapy with the game direction. In those cases, we'll learn from those experiences and build better tools, explain our game direction more thoroughly, or augment our support methods. If we cannot satisfy everyone, we can at least learn from their dissatisfaction.

That’s not to say that our support team are pushovers; on the contrary, we check our tickets against our game databases to verify what is being reported. All of them (including myself) have no compunctions about quickly and thoroughly removing exploiters or busting them back down to level one. That sense of justice, however, needs to be complemented by the reminder that everyone is a person on the other side of the monitor screen.

As the months go by and we continue to expand Game of Thrones Ascent, we’ll continue to try and deliver on high-quality and high-satisfaction support for our players. We believe that happy players who have good interactions with Disruptor Beam will be our best advocates for the game. If we cannot impress you, our existing and paying players, then we will have a hard time impressing others.

Lastly, you may reach our support team or review our Knowledge Base by going to http://support.disruptorbeam.com.